Get a Horse

Top fashion tips for travellers on the London Underground:

Cowboy hat: Not strictly acceptable but you may get away with it if you’re, you know, foreign

Cowboy hat and cowboy boots: Pushing it, verging on the OTT, but better than, say, a fur coat

Cowboy hat, cowboy boots and actual spurs: Too much.

You never have a camera with you when you need it, do you?

Halfway Up the Stairs

By A.V. Annoying-Commuter

Halfway to the platform
Is the place where I stop.
Even though this blocks other people from getting to the top.
It’s not my train that’s coming,
So I’m not going to rush.
I’m just going to stop here and risk a trampling in the crush

(With apologies to A A Milne)

Lost, Stolen or Strayed

Woo hoo! SouthWest Trains have recorded a new announcement to amuse us while we stand on the platform at Kew Bridge, awaiting our fate or the 17:41, whichever arrives sooner.  ‘Pickpockets are known to operate at this station,’ it warns us, and – after the standard exhortations to keep all our belongings with us at all times – goes on to suggest we should be extra vigilant ‘when using the telephones, or while waiting to buy a ticket’ Well, you’d be waiting a long time to buy a ticket at Kew Bridge, because there’s nowhere to buy one. Nor, indeed, are there any telephones.

Perhaps they’ve all been stolen?

Time Travel

Recently I’ve managed to kick my habit of cycling on the pavement. It was only on a tiny part of my daily route – from the pedestrian crossing to the park gates – and I persuaded myself that it was okay because I was always very considerate to pedestrians, unlike other cyclists, and besides there ought to be a cycle lane there anyway, and besides I’m in a hurry. But then I realised my excuses sounded just like those excuses of the car drivers who think it’s okay for them to speed (But I’m a very experienced driver, unlike the other drivers, and the speed limits are ridiculously low and besides, I’m in a hurry). I still think the whole cycle lane system round Vauxhall was designed by the same sadist who set the light timings so we have to choose between death and missing our trains, but I am being good and cycling only on the designated cycling bit of the pavement and down a side road, instead of straight to the park. I still get the odd dirty look from pedestrians who, curiously enough, haven’t noticed the tiny little round signs set at knee height letting them know that they’re on a joint pedestrian and bike lane, but those just bounce off the glowing aura of smugness that has settled around me as I go on my blameless way.

The sad thing is, this new route takes me past the back door of one of the clubs that fill the spaces underneath the arches of the railway line. There I am, at 7:30 in the morning, stone cold sober, with the whole working day stretching out in front of me, pedalling through the sleet and rain. And there are the revellers issuing out of the back door in a cloud of thumping bass and exotic-smelling smoke, for whom it is still merely some way into the night before. This is particularly painful on a Monday morning, when I realise that for them it’s still the weekend. And probably always will be…

I’d Rather Go Naked…

A woman got onto my train yesterday evening in a fur coat. A three-quarter length, definitely real, fox-fur coat that looked as though it would have been nicer when it was on the foxes. On a train. In England. Am I the only person who is shocked by this? When did it become socially acceptable to wear fur in this country? Sure, it was the day of the snow but we’re talking half an inch in London, not some three-day whiteout blizzard in Moscow. English weather very rarely throws up the sort of conditions that a raincoat and a woolly jumper can’t cope with. It certainly never calls for fur.

And – to be clear here – I’m not really talking the morality of it, or not exactly. She does, legally, have the perfect right to wear anything that isn’t endangered. Or indecent. Or leggings*. And we have the perfect right to be offended. For what surprised me was that nobody else batted an eyelid. There were no crowds of children following her pointing and laughing, and nobody spilled so much as a cup of coffee on it, let alone a tin of red paint. Surely, as a nation of so-called animal lovers someone ought to have at least tutted, and loudly. Or at the very least, as a nation of reverse snobs whose monarchy go around looking like people who’ve come to walk the dogs, we could object on taste grounds. I did as much glaring as I could on my own but everyone else ignored her and she sat on, complacently, totally unperturbed. This can’t be right, surely? Did I miss the memo? Is it now okay? On public transport? Tell me it ain’t so…

* The law may not be entirely clear on this point.

It’s a Chill Wind…

It’s a sad and depressing state of affairs when your first thought on discovering that it has snowed in the night is ‘now how the hell am I going to get to work?’. So, when the other half excitedly suggested I look out the window this morning (he walks to work, the bastard), my first thought was ‘Gosh doesn’t everything look pretty in the snow.’ My _second_ thought was ‘now how the hell am I going to get to work?’

The answer was – slowly. For a start I had to leave the bike at home. Bikes don’t mix with ice and snow. The longest second of my life was the second that extended between my applying my brakes the last time I tried cycling on the snow, and my landing in a heap on the ground – giving me plenty of time to remember just exactly why that was a bad idea. It seems the same sort of thing applies to trains. The first announcement I heard as I got to Vauxhall was that the 6:49 was delayed due to slippery rails, and after that the information system simply gave up the ghost and merely announced ‘Welcome to Vauxhall’ and the chap on the platform retreated into his little office and started making defensive and pointless announcements along the lines of ‘trains are delayed or cancelled and we don’t know either so don’t ask’ so we stopped knocking on his door and letting all the cold air in. Twenty minutes of this did begin to chip away at my sense of childlike wonder at the miracle of snow, but I tried to keep reminding myself that it was pretty, and finally a train appeared that could stop and we piled on and made our cautious way to work.

I wasn’t the only one keeping my spirits up. The train was crowded but good naturedly so. As people crammed themselves on at Clapham Junction I heard the following exchange: ‘Squeeze up a bit!’ ‘Say please!’ ’sorry, squeeze up a bit, please, thank you’, and people did squeeze up a bit. And as we pulled out of the station at Barnes Bridge I saw that someone had made the most of the waiting time and built themselves a snowman.

Things were back to normal this evening – the trains were back, and the snow had vanished. On the whole, despite the chaos, I think I’d rather have the snow.

And it was pretty…

 … even Vauxhall*

* Our Elephant & Castle correspondent reports that it will take more than a bit of snow to transform the Elephant, however

Policeman Clop

Anybody got any idea why the police should have started patrolling the streets around Kennington on horseback? I was cycling home last night when I heard the merry clip-clop of hooves and saw two policepersons and their policebeasts meandering around the streets near our house. I was pleased to note that they had their high-visibility jackets on and the outermost rider was showing a red bicycle-type light on the back and a white one at the front (I bet they don’t get their light brackets pinched as often as I do) prompting the other half to ask whether they also stick a blue flashing light on their head when going at full gallop. Who knows. They certainly weren’t galloping last night. In fact what they were doing remains a mystery. We’re not much given to rioting in these parts, unless the ocado delivery is late, so it wasn’t crowd control. And it’s a bit dark and cold and far away from any tourist attractions for them to be there for the tourists. It could be Lambeth police’s contribution to reduced carbon emissions, I suppose. Or it could simply be that if you’re going to have to be out in this wintry weather, it’s better to do it on a nice warm horse.*

I did originally write ‘with a nice warm horse between your legs’ but it seemed somehow a bit lewd…  

What do we Want? Longer Trains…

I have often dreamed, on one of those bad train days, of presenting a ticket inspector with only half a ticket, on the grounds that they’re only running half a train service. I never have, partly because I’m a coward, but mostly because all of the times there’s been real chaos, with passengers travelling sardine-class, they’ve never been able to get the inspectors through – or even on – the trains to collect the tickets. So more power to the pointy elbows of the Bath to Bristol train passengers who have not just organised a fares strike but printed out their own protest tickets to boot. I hope that GWR have the sense simply not to try and collect tickets on the really crowded trains until they’ve got stuff sorted out and won’t be dragging mild-mannered commuters through the courts in pursuit of their £1000 fines. After all, as Jade has discovered, there is such a thing as bad publicity.

All this coverage reminded me of another article a few days back, where the rail minister, Tom Harris*, apparently told passengers we’d have to accept over crowding on peak time services as a fact of life. I’m not sure if it was the way his remarks were edited, or what he actually said, but if you read the article he appears to conflate ‘over crowding’ with ‘not getting a seat’. Of course we don’t expect to get a seat on peak trains – but having people standing is not what we generally mean when we complain of over crowding. Over crowding isn’t having to stand on the train – it’s when you can’t get on the train in order to stand. Or when a single failed service topples every other following train because the backlog of passsengers can’t clear fast enough from the platform. Or when everyone has to breathe in unison, or when you can pick your feet off the floor and not fall over because the press of other passengers is holding you up. That’s over crowding. And if the rail minister doesn’t know that, then he must never have had to commute by train. In which case, I think we need a new rail minister, don’t you?

*No, I’d never heard of him either

Happiness is…

… not sharing your Bakerloo line carriage with a bunch of drunken football fans.

Unfortunately it’s the fleeting kind of happiness that you only recognise you were experiencing when it’s gone: when your train has pulled into Waterloo and picked up a carriage load of people who have clearly breakfasted on beer. And who all know each other. And who want to bring some laughter and jollity into the lives of the people who were in the carriage before them. And you realise that you’re going to have to run the gauntlet of them all in order to get out of the train.

And then when they start singing (somewhere between Embankment and Charing Cross), you start to feel nostalgic for the good old days when they were merely being jovial…

After the Storm

Anybody else catch the Today programme this morning? I was lying in bed in my normal semi-comatose fashion self-administering caffeine, when the headline caught my ears that ‘travel chaos was continuing’ after the storm, and that ‘travellers should check before setting off to the station avoid disappointment’ (my relationship with trains in this country is one of continual disappointment, but never mind). At that point they excitedly went over to their transport correspondent in Paddington for a live update. ‘So,’ Jim Humphrys or John Naughtie or whoever it was asked her, ’scenes of chaos there?’. Er, no, was her reply. All the trains were running fine with no delays. As were the planes. And the Eurostar. As a breaking news story, this was beginning to resemble the Great Dwarf Shortage of 1994 in its total lack of import. Finally, their hapless correspondent managed to dredge up the fact that GNER and Virgin trains were suffering some delays – Virgin Train Delays, the Dog Bites Man of transport news stories – and they put her out of her misery and went back to obsessing about who called whom what on Celebrity Big Brother. I took a calculated risk and didn’t check before setting off to Vauxhall, where the sum total of the promised chaos was the 7:41 running three minutes late and a slight delay at the news stand before I could pay for my paper.

I think the lesson we can learn from this is that if you’re the transport correspondent of the Today programme, you should think very carefully before calling in and using ‘train chaos’ as your excuse for getting in late in the morning. One of these days they’re going to call your bluff and put you on live before the bleary ears of the entire nation.